


The Meeting Of Your Sparks

by tielan



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Teachers, Developing Friendships, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Kid Fic, meet cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 23:20:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1706240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been a while since he felt a warmth like this in his belly, but he remembered how it felt to be attracted to someone in his gut – that pull of interest that was one part sexual, one part personality, all parts desire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Meeting Of Your Sparks

**Author's Note:**

> bloglikejaeger [made a post](http://bloglikejaeger.tumblr.com/post/85796368039/okay-but-mako-raleigh-au-where-raleighs-the) where she bemoaned the lack of a Mako/Raleigh single parent/kindy teacher AU.
> 
> My brain thought this was a cute idea and started writing it in my 'Drafts' folder on Tumblr. Then it got transferred to a word document and a whole world kind of built up around it. This kind of thing happens.
> 
> Oh, and Cotton Candy Bingo prompt "Attraction". :)

“Hey, Tendo, I’m gonna be late.”

Tendo make a noise like a snort. “What’s her name this time?”

“Hiromi. And before you say anything dirty, she’s five years old and her mom’s running late. Called and everything. We can’t get hold of her secondary carer, so I’m staying back.” Raleigh glanced over his shoulder at the little girl who was sitting on a desk, swinging her boots back and forth with her eyes fixed on the little scarlet flowers that adorned the ankles, humming to herself in happy unconcern. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll text when I’m on my way.”

He put the phone away, then wandered over to Hiromi, who smiled up at him with big dark eyes and stuck one foot out. “Do you like my boots?”

“I do,” Raleigh said with all the solemnity due the discussion of footwear with a kindergarten-aged girl. “The flower is very pretty.”

She beamed at him, pleased by his taste. “I wanted boots like mommy’s, but they only had these ones. There were pink boots, but I didn’t want the pink ones. I have a pink coat from Grampa Stacks, but Uncle Chuck says it’s girly.”

Raleigh considered the conversational options. “What do you think? Do you like the pink coat?”

“Yes,” she said. “I like this one better.” Her coat today was powder blue - a little duffle coat with big black buttons that looked pretty snug in the winter chill. “Mommy said she had one of these when she was little, too. So I like this coat.”

“And which one does your Daddy like?”

She shrugged and looked down at her toes again. “I don’t have a daddy. He went away when I was a baby. Uncle Chuck says that if the sonovabitch ever comes back, he’ll bury him.”

Raleigh winced - as much at the blunt speech as the awkwardness. He’d put his foot in that one, and he should have known better. His own father walked out on them when Raleigh was fifteen, and his mom never quite recovered from the desertion.

So he found himself agreeing with Uncle Chuck’s sentiment, if not the manner of its expression.

“Can we play with the wood blocks?”

He looked at the winsome little face in front of him and smiled. “Okay. But we’ll have to put them away when your mom comes.”

“Yay!”

She jumped off the table and ran to the toy cupboard in the back corner of the room, nearly vibrating with excitement as Raleigh unlocked the door and took out the block box.

For a five year old, Hiromi was pretty good at building structures – a good eye for balance, and a very definite idea of what things should look like. Raleigh got told, “No, not there,” several times before he just started handing her the blocks so she could decide how she was going to place it.

He’d been working with this class for only a couple of weeks so far, and he hadn’t noticed Hiromi before. She wasn’t one of the noisy kids, or the troublemakers; she did what she was told most of the time, and wasn’t precociously showy.

However, out of class and away from the other kids, she was an engaging little thing, observant and comfortably conversational.

“What’s your mommy do?”

“She makes things. Bridges. And buildings. _Taaaalll_ buildings,” Hiromi said, stretching her hand up in the air to indicate how high.

“Have you ever been up in one of them?”

“The silvery one with the ball on top,” she said promptly.

Raleigh froze. It took him a moment to get his tongue working. “Your mom worked on Jaeger Tower?”

“She _made_ it.” Hiromi gave him a look of impatience. “Uncle Chuck calls it ‘The Dong’, but Grampa Herc scowls when he says that.”

“Well, he probably shouldn’t call it that,” Raleigh said, his mind still spinning.

Jaeger Tower had been built by PPDC Constructions. The project had been managed by no less than... Stacker Pentecost – who would be the little girl’s ‘Grampa Stacks’. Which would make ‘Grampa Herc’, Herc Hansen, who’d been Pentecost’s right-hand man and rumoured lover even back then.

How long had it been since he’d thought of PPDC Constructions? Apart from the pang he felt as he walked past the wing-stretched eagle logo on his way to work every morning. After Yancy died, it had taken him five years to start to feel like he even had a right to be alive, and he wasn’t sure that would survive going back to where it all ended.

“I like going up in Jaeger Tower,” Hiromi continued, unaware of the conflicts within her teacher. “You can see _everything_.”

“It would have a very good view,” Raleigh managed solemnly, remembering the plans. “Your mommy must be a very talented engineer.”

There was a soft cough from the door.

“Mommy!” Hiromi’s squeal left Raleigh wincing – nearly as much as her precipitate plunge through the tower of blocks to fling herself at the woman in the doorway.

Raleigh stood up more slowly, letting his gaze linger on the dark hair that swung blue by her jawline as she hoisted Hiromi up on her hip. She’d been much younger in the photo on Pentecost’s desk – her face round and soft with youth. But he’d have recognised her instantly all the same - a grown woman and not an adolescent, but utterly unmistakeable, utterly unforgettable.

“Miss Mori.”

“I’m sorry I am late…” She trailed off as she really _looked_ at him. “Raleigh Becket?”

“That would be me.” He managed a smile and held out a hand for her to shake, an automatic movement, mere muscle memory, even years after he’d left the business.

“But, what—? Why—?” She stopped and gathered herself. “Thank you for staying to look after Hiromi. The meeting ran overtime and then they had questions and then I could not get away…”

“I know how it is. It’s no hardship to look after Hiromi.”

“Oh, but you have things to do, I am sure. We will get out of your way immediately.” On another woman’s lips it might have been a dismissal, but Raleigh was pretty sure this was just her way of apologising.

“Mommy!” Hiromi protested. “We have to put blocks away!”

“Oh. Oh. Of course.”

Raleigh watched, somewhat bemused, as she set her daughter down and walked right past him and into the classroom, crouching down to help Hiromi pick up the blocks. She had no hesitation about getting down on her hands and knees on the carpet in her crisp business suit and scarlet-accented boots, and Raleigh allowed himself a moment of amusement and admiration, before he went in to pick up the more distant scatters after Hiromi leaped up to greet her mom.

“Hiromi was telling me you worked on Jaeger Tower.”

“Oh. Yes.” She herded a number of blocks over to where Hiromi was happily scooping them into the box. “For several years. We only finished it six months ago.”

“Structural architect?”

Ms. Mori’s mouth curved in distracting ways. “You have seen the dedication block on the Tower.”

It took him a moment to think enough to reply. “No. I’ve never been to the Tower.”

“Oh! But then…” She trailed off, and something about her expression arrested him.

“What?”

“You should go and see it.”

Raleigh sat back on his haunches. “Or you could just tell me.” He had no real desire to go back to the Tower again – the memories of dust and steel and blood and burning still sharp in his mind.

Mako sat and regarded him for a moment. “There is a memorial for those who died in the attack – the fountain in the atrium carries their names, as well as the names of those who survived.”

 _Billowing dust and stinging cement. Blood on his shaking hands as he dragged at the strut pinning Yancy down – thank God they hadn’t gotten any further than two floors up._ —Raleigh, listen to me, you— _The world shaking with what he later learned was the secondary explosion._

Warm hands on his, fingers curling into his palms, and voices calling him back to the present.

“Mr. Becket? Mr. Becket!” Then, quieter, “Raleigh.”

His hands closed around hers. He drew an unsteady breath into his lungs and exhaled with controlled slowness.

“I am sorry.” When he looked up, the compassion in her eyes was bruising. “I should not have said.”

“No,” he said, or tried to say. It took another attempt to get his voice working. “No, it’s on me. I shouldn’t have asked – I knew it would trigger—” He bit his lip. Not something he wanted to talk about right now, especially not to a pretty woman. “Thank you. For telling me about it.”

Mako hesitated a moment, then nodded. Raleigh felt the sudden awkwardness of their joined hands and let go. “Oh, no, Hiromi, let me do that.”

She’d started to drag the box over to the toy cupboard, rucking up the rug in the process – but ‘helped’ Raleigh pick it up and then ran to hold the cupboard door open for him. A determined little thing, for all that she was seriously pint-sized.

“どうも有難う, Hiromi.”

Her expression brightened into wide-eyed delight. “日本語が話せますか?” A fluid stream of Japanese followed, faster than Raleigh could follow.

“Hey,” he said, laughing. “Slow down a bit. I’m not that good!”

Mako was climbing to her feet, saying something in Japanese to her daughter, chiding and amused both at once. Hiromi said something to her mom – the fluidity of it escaped him, but it sounded like she was asking if he could come to dinner with them.

“Oh,” he said hastily, “no, it’s okay. I’m meeting someone. Tendo Choi – you know Tendo.”

It wasn’t a rash statement. Everyone knew Tendo. He was the kind of guy that people knew. People living in hermit huts out in the middle of the Gobi Desert probably knew Tendo. And, indeed, Hiromi crowed, “Tendo!”

“No,” Mako said firmly. “We must leave Mr. Becket to meet with Tendo alone. Besides, you are having dinner with the Grampas, remember?”

There was a moment when Hiromi looked torn between two equally promising prospects, before the Grampas apparently won out. Mako looked relieved. Raleigh hoped he hid his disappointment slightly better. Not that he particularly wanted an inquisitive five year old and her mom at dinner with Tendo, just that…well, better leave that alone.

Of course, that was what his brain thought. His mouth had _other_ ideas.

“Hey, Hiromi, maybe you and your mom could take me to Jaeger Tower and show me the ‘everything’ view some time?”

Hiromi’s eyes widened. “Ooh, yes! Mommy!”

“I… Hiromi, I don't think—”

Raleigh could practically see the excuses crowding her lips in an attempt to be polite. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“No, it’s is—You see—We were going next weekend,” she said, a little rushed. “There will be a memorial service. For the anniversary.”

Raleigh caught his breath. Seven years. Sometimes he forgot just how long it had been since he’d woken up in hospital, confused and exhausted and alone, wondering why Yancy wasn’t there, hovering and flirting with the female staff. Only later had he discovered Yancy was two months dead and buried – along with most of the work crew who’d been on site that day.

Raleigh and six other people on site had survived the explosion, and he’d come out of it with no more than a shoulder that ached in the cold.

“You do not need to—”

“No,” he said swiftly, before he could lose his courage, before he could back out. “I’d…I’d like to go with you guys. If you meant it.”

“Of course!” Hiromi interrupted bouncing on her little booted toes. “Mommy keeps her promises.”

“Oh, she does, does she?”

Raleigh smiled at Mako who was going pink. Quite adorably.

The little girl flung her arms around her mom. “Yes.”

“Well,” Mako said, clearly embarrassed by the praise, “Mommy promised Grampa Stacks that we would not be late for dinner, and now it is looking unlikely that we will be on time. So we will not take up any more of Mr. Becket’s time, Hiromi. Get your bag, please.”

The kid nodded, and promptly ran across the room to fetch her backpack.

“It wasn’t a hardship,” Raleigh said when Mako turned back to apologise. She didn’t even have to open her mouth for him to know that she was going to say ‘sorry’. “And thank you. For telling me about the memorial. You don’t have to drag me along if you don’t want, though. I’m not... I don’t want to intrude on your day with Hiromi.”

She shook her head. “You are welcome to come to the memorial, either with us, or on your own if you prefer.”

“Thank you,” he said, meaning it.

When she glanced past him at Hiromi as the kid fitted her backpack on her little shoulders, Raleigh stared at her a moment or two longer. It had been a while since he felt a warmth like this in his belly, but he remembered how it felt to be attracted to someone in his gut – that pull of interest that was one part sexual, one part personality, all parts desire.

He wasn’t so sure he remembered how to play the game, though. Pickups were easy – he could pick up a woman without even thinking about it. But a woman like Mako Mori? He’d be cheating himself if he settled for a few nights in the sack, a quick fuck.

And that all assumed that she was even interested – she might not be. And when all was said and done, he was just her kid’s kindy teacher.

Her kid’s kindy teacher with a few common connections.

“Say hi to Pentecost for me. And Hansen, if he remembers me.” At Mako’s faintly astonished look, he shrugged. “We were on a project together a long time ago.”

“He would remember you.”

She said it so positively that Raleigh felt like smiling. Maybe he did from the way she flicked a gaze his way, then blushed and turned to Hiromi.

“Ready to go?”

“Yes. 有難う御座います, Becket-san.”

He inclined his head to her and watched her eyes light up. “どういたしまして, Hiromi.”

Raleigh closed up the classroom, then walked back through admin, nodding at the security guard who was monitoring this building tonight.

Out on the stairs of the school, he watched them, grinning when Hiromi turned to wave goodbye, interrupting her mom as Mako tried to get her into the child seat. But the hand he lifted to wave back was for them both, and it wasn’t Hiromi whose smile tightened his chest like a steel band wrapped around it.

When he pulled out his phone to tell Tendo know he was on his way, he found he’d missed six text messages.

The first one read, _Hiromi? As in, Hiromi Mori, Pentecost’s grandkid?_

The last one read, _What am I saying? I bet you’ve already named all your kids together. And the dog. Hiromi has been wanting a dog for ages – all Mako will let her have are goldfish._

Raleigh snorted to himself and texted back. _You’re full of shit._

 _Sure,_ came the response, seconds later. _But I’m right._

There wasn’t all that much Raleigh could say to that in text. He settled for, _I’ll see you at the bar in fifteen._

Then he made a beeline for the nearby MTR station.

_When you're in love you never really know_  
 _whether your elation comes from the_  
 _qualities of the one you love,_  
 _or if it attributes them to her;_  
 _whether the light which surrounds her like a halo_  
 _comes from you, from her,_  
 _or from the meeting of your sparks._

_~ Natalie Clifford Barney ~_

**Author's Note:**

> ps. quigonejinn? Tag, you're it!


End file.
